Generally, an air conditioner for a vehicle automatically decides a temperature and air volume of conditioned air sent out from each blowout port according to various parameters such as a temperature setting, outside air temperature, inside air temperature and sunshine. However, one person's sensitivity to temperature may differ from that of other person, as some passengers are sensitive to heat and others are sensitive to cold. Therefore, even when the air conditioner automatically decides a temperature of conditioned air, air volume of conditioned air and so forth, the temperature and the air volume are not necessarily optimum for passengers in some cases. In such a case, if necessary, the passenger adjusts the air conditioner so that the temperature setting is raised or lowered, or the air volume is increased or decreased. In this connection, Japanese unexamined patent publication NO. 2000-293204 discloses an air conditioner controller with learning control, which modifies a relational equation for deciding the temperature and the volume of conditioned air using various parameters when a temperature setting and an air volume setting are changed by a passenger via an operation panel.
In addition, one passenger may change the setting of an air conditioner independent of the temperature sensitivity of other passengers. A passenger may change the setting due to an external environmental factor. For example, when doing exercises right before driving a vehicle, the temperature setting may be decreased lower than a usual setting. Or, when the vehicle is stuck in a traffic jam, in order to prevent the passenger room from being filled with exhaust gas, a recirculation mode may be set. However, in the air conditioner controller described in Japanese unexamined patent publication NO. 2000-293204, it is impossible to discriminate between a case in which the setting of the air conditioner is changed due to an external environmental factors and a case in which the setting is changed simply to provide a more comfortable temperature.
On the other hand, Japanese unexamined patent publication No. 2000-62431 discloses an air conditioner for an automobile which can perform either the air conditioning learning or the other learning separately by adding data indicating a location of the vehicle itself during driving, to the learning data. The air conditioner decides whether or not the air conditioning learning is performed, referring to the location of the vehicle and the date and hour. However, Japanese unexamined patent publication No. 2000-62431 does not disclose a concrete method of deciding whether or not air conditioning learning is performed. Further, optimizing the air conditioning temperature in accordance with the specific circumstances is not disclosed.
Therefore, it is desirable to develop an air conditioner for automatically optimizing an air conditioning temperature and so forth in accordance with specific circumstances.